Did Neil Young just buy Crazy Horse’s beaded jacket?

For 10k? I hope so. Someone did today, anonymously, at an auction I happened to cover.

No one in our culture has loved Crazy Horse better than Neil Young. No one individual better deserves a chance to have a beaded jacket that appears to be (at least through the Internet) more of a sacred vestment than a garment.

(Guess that if Young did buy what appears to be a sacred item, he would want to preserve it, and perhaps wear it only at special occaions, if it all.)

Anyhow:

The anonymous buyer bought the beaded jacket over the phone. Auctioneer John Eubanks, a master at the trade, asked the young man taking the call where the buyer was calling from, in front of the crowd at the barn-sizred auctionhouse in Casitas Springs. .

The young man didn't say.

At the auction were many other extraordinary items, including Butch Cassidy's "amnesty Colt," the gun he hoped to trade in 1899 for one last chance at a peaceful, perhaps loving. life. But although the gun sold for about seventeen times the — what to call it? — the beaded jacket, which is most beautiful?.

The disparity is strange, although I suppose explained by the durability and otherwise collectible nature of old guns. Probably it won’t be too much longer before that jacket will have to be preserved under glass to ensure its long-term survival.

Speaking of Crazy Horse, although the memorial project is just as much of an environmental obscenity as the Rushmore one, I have to admit that it has an appealing look and sense of movement even with just the face and a vague outline completed. Based on pure attractiveness it should be more popular than Rushmore when complete, which would at least be a nice irony.